Thanks AR Ill let your comments stand as a testament of what the social left does when they are losing an argument.

“I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.”

Oh well, it is your right to think that the country is better served by spending billions of dollars locking up pot smokers. As it is my right to understand how small-minded you are on this subject.

Yes I am very relieved that our drug enforcement agencies have prevent the hijacking of any airline by crack smoking leprechauns. Now if we could just convince those leprechauns that they can find fulfillment in life with other pursuits other then crack smoking then we would not have to spend so much money keeping eyes on potential leprechaun suspects.

Then the fact that very few planes are hijacked by crack-smoking leprechauns should boost your faith even further.

I have another test we should try. Why dont you go have triple by pass surgery and let all the Doctors and nurses in the room get good and stoned before they proceed.

While no one's advocating we should all drive stoned, both driving experiments and traffic studies give marijuana a relatively clean bill of health, particularly when compared to alcohol. From http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=5449:

“Britain's Transport Research Laboratory, found that volunteers performed better on a driving simulator under the influence of pot than they did after consuming alcohol. According to the study, marijuana only adversely impacted subjects' ability to maintain a constant speed and control while driving around a figure-eight loop. Reaction time and all other measures of driving performance remained unaffected. Researchers also noted that the subjects who had smoked marijuana – unlike alcohol users – were aware of their impairment and attempted to compensate for it by driving more cautiously.

“Similar results were also reported in March by a South Australian team at the Department of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide. Their epidemiological review of automobile accidents found that alcohol “overwhelmingly plays the greatest role in road crashes … [and] conversely, … marijuana has a negligible impact on culpability.” The study was a follow up to a 1998 analysis of 2,500 injured drivers that previously determined cannabis to have “no significant effect” on drivers' culpability in motor vehicle accidents.”

The typical position of the “legalize marijuana” crowd do not approach the argument from a rational perspective but rather its my GAWD DAMN RIGHT to SCREW MYSELF UP and PISS on you for trying to tell me that I dont have that right.

Fine. I really dont care if you want to spend your entire life stoned, just as long as your job consists of standing on the back of a garbage truck picking up trash cans daily. Because you know when I go have that triple bypass surgery I franky dont care if the surgeon ducks out the back and smokes a cigarette but I sure as hello care if he ducks out the back and tokes on a reefer or has a couple swigs of whiskey.

I do not care if he had three pounds of transfat and inhaled 2 dozen oysters and 6000milligrams of cholesterol prior to the surgery but I sure do care if he toked, snorted or fried up some heroin or Meth prior to cutting me open.

Each year there are thousands and thousands of deaths and the emergency rooms are full of people who have injured themselves quite seriously as the result of being drunk or intoxicated or close to such. There are many more who visit those same hospitals who have been injured by others who are drunk. DESPITE regulation, legislation and laws addressing the behavior of drinking and drunks the deaths and injuries just continue unabated.

Now we want to legalize Cannibus because after all the guys smoking it are just fun loving guys and gals who are out to have a good time. When in reality the amounts of Death and destruction that occur even with legalazation will continue to climb causing MY insurance rates to climb. Causing my Auto Insurance to climb. My new car will have to have added saftey features because now we have a million new intoxicated drivers on the road. The legislation will escalate and the price will be steep.

But we will save 1 billion on throwing those fun loving druggies in the slammer only to replace that billion with a 100 billion in more health care costs and more legislation and tougher enforcement laws and hiring more cops to patrol our streets trying to catch inebriated druggies.

On and on and on it goes.

Do I think my house will be swarmed with druggies? No. But I do think the country will be swarmed with billions more in unintended consequences.

Sometimes as a parent you just have to say no cause its the right thing to do. To this.. NO….go to your room.

I knew somebody would say that. It's not tyranny if it's not tyrannical but what most people want, plus it is reasonable. Completely restriction-free access to drugs is not reasonable. My saying so in no way can be misconstrued to mean, for example, that I support something I have been at the forefront on record against, civil asset forfeiture.

Libertarianism, which underpins my own philosophy of living as it does anyone of English heritage, does not mean licentiousness or libertinism, or anarchism or atomism.

“Almost every basic human act can be broken down into a morality argument.”

In fact, as Robert Bork correctly has stated, we legislate (and enforce) little else. The key is to define as well as to secure the consent of the governed (in the proper manner). And the constitution makes explicit (and constitutional) that people can, under proper means and circumstances, be deprived of their rights, as well as their property and even their lives. It's a heavy responsibity that is associated with the power to do this. But there is no question that it can be done and was anticipated by the Founders. (They didn't want such powers to be corrupted as well as corrupting.)

And to be clear, I didn't say unregulated, even if I didn't specifically say laws similar to alcohol and cigarettes would be the logical model.

So I said it now. Does that change your opinion, or do you still think marauding bands of potheads suffering from reefer madness will descend upon your household and go all Manson on you and your family?

Almost every basic human act can be broken down into a morality argument. What are you advocating? Other then anarchy?

In general, laws should be created to protect people's lives, liberties, and properties (i.e. laws against murder, laws against assault, laws against battery, laws against rape, laws against kidnapping, laws against theft). I would also include laws against fraud and libel.

Enforcing “morality” is not the proper role of government in a free society. And determining what kind of rights people should have based upon what the majority wants is also not conducive to a free society. That's why the Founding Father's explicitly created the United States as a Republic and not a Democracy.

Almost every basic human act can be broken down into a morality argument. What are you advocating? Other then anarchy?

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing marijuana decriminalized, but it's what the community as a whole decides and votes that matters.

That's basically tyranny of the majority, which is not what this country was founded on, DLS.

Allowing politicians to legislate morality based upon the majority of the public wants is a horrible idea and is the surest way to have our freedoms disappear one by one.

“Here in America we build our sports figures up so that they are worshiped like gods. “

Believe it or not, K, I heard on a local AM radio station today a comment related to this, during a discussion the host was having with a former pro football player. There's so much attention paid to these kids throughout their lives (no, I do not like this phenomenon) that something good can be argued to have developed as a result. All the experience with (excess) attention and hype and pressure (I'm disgusted with parents and other adults who ruin sports for the kids!) at least makes them able to handle, even as younger players in professional sports (their first few years in pro sports), the hype and pressure with big games such as the Super Bowl this weekend.

God knows the headlines are filled with enough “children attacked by crazed stoners” stories already.

“people on the Left, who are infantile when it comes to personal conduct and facing the word 'no,'”

that some libertarians, who find shelter on the Right by default due to assault from the Left, are similarly infantile (the dishonest or ignorant will state that _all_ libertarian-leaning people are that way), I'll remind you that there's a distinction and a difference between the normal libertarian, who is not anarchic, wholly atomistic, and similarily infantile, and the kind of person who's a cousin to the radicals' legacy on the Left, who claims “libertarianism” as a rationale and an excuse for any and all behavior, about which “offensive” as a word and even a concept is irrelevent. (They're childish libertines who don't care, in other words, and similar to the most radical leftists insofar as personal conduct and misconduct are concerned.)

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing marijuana decriminalized, but it's what the community as a whole decides and votes that matters.

As to drug reform, each drug is different and must be addressed individually. Alcohol is so strongly embedded in our culture that it is self-defeating to try to restrict its use strongly, as “Prohibition” attempted to do (it was not absolute prohibition, there were no searches on the street, etc.). That is obviously _not_ true for marijuana, commonplace and relatively-harmless as that drug happens to be nevertheless.

The Phelps issue is no excuse for a childish rush to, or demand for, marijuana decriminalization.